Data read from a disk is susceptible to errors caused by media defects and thermal asperities which may result in burst errors. As data is moved between the storage media and the auxiliary storage device, the data is transmitted over a read channel. Media defects and thermal asperities are transient electrical events, usually associated with a particle, and normally resulting in misreading data in a portion of a sector. Absent accurate detection of these errors the effectiveness of data transmission is reduced. A burst error is a number of errors adjacent to each other. Burst errors happen relatively frequently in the transmission of data and are defined as long or short burst. Long burst errors are easy to detect because of the existence of strong signatures. However, short burst errors are hard to detect because of lack of signatures. This difficulty in detection of short burst errors is common to all coding practices. For example, the failure to detect the short burst errors in using low-density parity-checking encoders and decoders may result in these errors being magnified at the output of the detector. A 100 bit thermal asperity error may propagate to produce a more then 200 bit error at the output of the detector.
Accordingly, there is a need for a mechanism to detect the short burst errors and reduce the adverse affects of short burst errors which can result in poor performance of auxiliary storage devices, such as hard disk drives.